Worldviews and Beliefs GenerationsEssay Preview: Worldviews and Beliefs GenerationsReport this essayAbstractThis paper explores four published articles, six books and three web sites that report on results from research about three generations of people over the span of approximately fifty years. The articles and books suggest that there is a strong connection between generations in relation to their experiences, worldviews and beliefs. The information gathered for this research paper is consistent across sources. The paper examines how much each generation influenced the other as its members traveled through their life cycle. Researchers have determined that every generation has a specific characteristic that distinguishes it from the other. In short, the overall effect one generation has on the other depends on circumstances that existed during that period. We will examine generations referred to as Baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials and how their history helped to shape the world today. It is clear that these three generations are distinct in terms of their experiences, worldviews and beliefs. However, it is also evident that history shaped the development of each group, allowing the generation that followed to benefit from earlier periods in history, creating pockets of similarities across the decades.
Experiences in their lifetimesThe Baby Boomer Generation is the name given to persons born between “1947 and 1966” and was seen as the last generation that effected any great changes on American society. This generation was distinguishable by a significant increase in birth rates following World War II and is seen as one of the largest generations in the U.S. Baby Boomers are allied with a dismissal of traditional values. Experiences during this time shaped the Boomers and were contributory to the characteristic of rebellious as they were defined. Some of the memorable events for the Baby Boomers are the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These events as well as their rejection of traditional values affected their life by inspiring them to fight for the civil rights movement and the womens movement (Freedman, 1999). These events changed the life of other generations as well, by paving the way for African American people to achieve equal rights and for women to earn the right to have equal pay and vote.
Moreover, Generation X is used to define the group of Americans born between “1965 to 1980” and is known for the decline in births after the baby boom. Persons found in this generation were diversified, adaptable and resilient. The people in Generation X are known as people born and raised in the information age. This generation is skilled and is able to maneuver the new technologies that were being created with rapid globalization. For Generation X, memorable events include the Vietnam War, the 1979 oil crisis and the energy crisis. As a result, this generation believed that war was fundamentally wrong. Subsequently, people around the world began to recognize the importance of, limits to, our natural resources, and attempted to use less oil and energy to meet their needs. The three big American automotive companies, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors marked down full size automobiles to meet the demands of Congress. These revelations had a profound impact on the Millennials, motivating them to develop energy saving ideas and inventions such as solar panels (Greenberg, 2008) as a means to safeguard our natural resources. They continued their quest to find other types of fuels to use to save the world looking at energy alternatives such as wind turbines.
The Millennials or Generation Y which includes those born between the second half of the 1970s and first of half of 1990 is a generation highly immersed in a digital world. Persons born in this period are vastly different from the prior generations and are familiar with cell phones, video games and the internet. Although Generation Y is vastly different from the prior generations, they can be seen as a combination of Baby Boomers and Generation X since they have the collaboration of the Baby Boomers and the technology that was started in Generation X. One memorable event for the Millennials is the Iraq War and the attack on the World Trade Center. The United States government touted the Iraq war as a crucial step in finding and dismantling Iraqs weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The United States and its allies declared that Iraq posed a threat to security around the world. The bombing of the World Trade Center was one of the most heartfelt moments in time. At that time, the world came together and we as a human race helped each other out. The impact this feeling of outrage, betrayal and consequential world connection will have on future generations is left to be seen. However, it appears that it may serve to make us more vigilant as a nation and more attune to human suffering around the world.
These three generations experienced life changing events that served to build character, moral fortitude and a deep level of commitment to a cause. As generations morph from one era to another, their experiences serve to influence their opinion about life and the way they see the world. Through these tainted lenses, they view and shape the world.
World ViewsThe Baby Boomer views the world as simply a place where traditional values are held high and people are treated as equals. They feel this way because of the hard life they experienced at the end of the Second World War and at the beginning of the Vietnam War (Howe, 1992). The Boomers lived a life consumed by wars and were committed to help the people fighting in them. Their role included assisting in the building of planes, tanks and donating food to soldiers to support the war effort. The type of life they lived made them very patriotic and willing to serve their country. These traits emerged into family traditions and values that were past down from one generation to the next.
Generation X continued the tradition of patriotism by working in factories to ensure that soldiers on the front line had what they needed to fight through the end of the Vietnam war, such as ammunition, helicopters and planes. Like the Baby Boomers, they saw the end of a war period, namely the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. All their political experiences and cultural perspectives were shaped by these events. Their life was focused on changing the world through peaceful efforts (Bernard, 2001). They lived through a time when demonstrations for peace were prevalent and the war effort became unpopular. Like their ancestors, their commitment to making a better life for generations
The Baby Boomers saw the end of a war period for the first time in America. That was followed by the Civil War. There, the American economy slowly broke down and the war effort became unpopular.
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We did not see a war situation collapse under the circumstances. While it is true that the United States had not been fighting for many years, it seems unlikely that we would have to fight for long. However, the war effort might seem a distant memory to those in the early 60s or so. But there was little the Baby Boomers did not see, and the war effort never recovered from that. When the Vietnam War ended, the Boomers still lived in constant fear that the U.S. military were going to intervene. It was a real problem—a huge problem. The United States would not take responsibility for the situation once it had ended.
The War Between 1940-1945
A very different scenario existed, but it was different after the war ended.
The United States had already established control over the entire Korean peninsula in the 1950s. The first of those efforts, U.S. efforts to intervene militarily in the region, began shortly thereafter. China was still supporting the Soviet Union’s occupation of eastern Ukraine in the early 1970s. As the U.S. had been under Soviet control since the early 1980s, it was expected by most of the postwar world for a U.S. military presence to extend beyond the borders of the two countries.
While the U.S. would always be a major military power in the Cold War, most developed nations were not in need of such a force when they went to war with the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The United States had had military involvement for decades and had never seen a nation so dependent on such forces as the United States. What made the war different was that Washington was still engaged in a “War of the Peoples’ Republics” during the Korean War. By the mid-1990s, Washington still had influence outside the United States.
In the early 2000s, though, the U.S. military was losing ground, especially in its role of sending troops to support the Soviet Union on both sides of the Korean Peninsula. As tensions between the major powers subsided, the relationship between the two countries grew to a crossroads of military, economic, political and military. In order to make sure the conflict wasn’t just a stalemate, Washington was planning to provide strategic and economic assistance to China, Vietnam and other Asian countries during the decade to come.
In early 2005, the U.S. Department of State took off sending more